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How Ecuadorian páramos are perceived has drastically changed over the last five decades. From cold, hostile, and unproductive hinterlands, páramos have changed to become areas for biodiversity conservation and ‘water towers’ that ought to be protected to provide clean and abundant water for cities and irrigation. To understand how these changing pe...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... The Socio Páramo Program in the Oyacachi Indigenous Territory is concentrated in the headwaters or páramo area, not in the valleys. According to official data, the indigenous territory has 62,630 ha, of which approximately 20,000 ha are now under the Socio Páramo agreement (see Figure 2). ...
Context 2
... 2001 the community of Oyacachi was recognized as 'owner' of it. This territory comprised over 62,000 hectares many of which are páramos in the headwater of the rivers and springs that feed Salve Faccha and the Cangahua irrigation system; all is within the now National Park Cayambe-Coca (Figure 2). This declaration of indigenous territory with fixed spatial boundaries gave the community a very strong negotiation position. ...
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Citations
... En este sentido, las entrevistas a estudiantes arrojaron resultados similares, pues si bien reconocen las problemáticas que afectan la ruralidad como espacio sociocultural y físico, no se asociaban directamente a la solución. Este último aspecto indicó una pobreestructurada identidad rural en los participantes; un aspecto que resulta crítico, pues además de fortalecer la identidad de estos, se trata de prepararlos para actuar como líderes encaminados a la transformación de la identidad de las futuras generaciones (Guáqueta-Solórzano y Postigo, 2022;Manosalvas et al., 2023). ...
The transformation of rural contexts calls for innovative strategies combining endogenous and exogenous factors to achieve sustainable management of resources and sustainable growth. Furthermore, this integration must respond to the communities' cultural identity and ancestral knowledge, consider their perspectives, and project the role of the next generations. A sequential mixed study was conducted aimed at diagnosing the sociodemographic, conceptual, and practical elements necessary to implement a design thinking methodology with the objective of strengthening rural identity in Colombia. The results indicate that raising awareness among young people and encouraging their training as transformative leaders capable of energizing design thinking processes is necessary. In addition, principles are offered for the adequate development of said training and the design of a methodology. The findings allowed us to conclude that participatory and community-centered approaches could be the most suitable for strengthening identity and the subsequent rural transformation.
... Davoudi and Machen [16] for instance, studied how imaginaries materialise specific ideas on how to cope with climate change. For us, this materialisation is key; sociotechnical imaginaries are more than the imagination and exist beyond the mind [17][18][19][20][21]. Jasanoff and Kim [10] (p19), in their definition of sociotechnical imaginaries, for instance emphasize that imaginaries are about performed visions: "Collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable), animated by shared understanding about social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology". ...
In the field of climate change adaptation, the future matters. Amongst others, river futures justify the way adaptation projects materialize in rivers. In this paper, we challenge the ways in which dominant paradigms and expert claims monopolise the truth concerning policies and designs of river futures, side-lining and delegitimizing alternative river futures. Currently, limited work is done to critically reflect on the power of river futures in the context of climate change adaptation. We conceptualized the power of river futures through river imaginaries: collectively performed and publicly envisioned reproductions of riverine socionatures, mobilized through truth claims of social life and social order. Through the Border Meuse project case study, a climate change adaptation project in a stretch of the river Meuse in the south of the Netherlands and a proclaimed success story of climate adaptation in Dutch water management, we elucidated how three river imaginaries: a modern river imaginary, a market-driven imaginary and an eco-centric river imaginary, merged and materialized as an eco-modern river imaginary. Importantly, not only the river futures merged, also their aligned truth regimes merged. To this end, we argue that George Orwell’s famous quote “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past” can be extended to ‘Who controls the future, controls how we see and act in the present, and how we rediscover the past’.
... Varias investigaciones se han centrado en evaluar los impactos de los cambios en la cobertura vegetal y el uso de la tierra sobre el contenido y almacenamiento de agua en el suelo, particularmente en los páramos del sur del Ecuador. Varios estudios han demostrado consistentemente que la forestación con plantaciones de pinos reduce significativamente el contenido de agua del suelo (hasta un 50-60 %) en relación con la vegetación nativa (es decir, pajonales, arbustos, bosques de Polylepis; Harden et al., 2013;Marín et al., 2018;Patiño et al., 2021;Mosquera et al., 2022). Estas observaciones indican que se debe restringir la forestación con pinos en áreas de páramo conservadas para asegurar su capacidad de proveer los servicios de generación y regulación de caudales . ...
... El cultivo -principalmente de papa-y el pastoreo intensivo de ovinos y bovinos han mostrado efectos contrastantes sobre el contenido y almacenamiento de agua del suelo que van desde fuertes reducciones (por ejemplo, Podwojewski et al., 2002;Daza Torres et al., 2014;Marín et al., 2018;Patiño et al., 2021) a ningún cambio o incluso aumentos leves (p. ej., Buytaert et al., 2005;Marín et al., 2018). ...
... El cultivo -principalmente de papa-y el pastoreo intensivo de ovinos y bovinos han mostrado efectos contrastantes sobre el contenido y almacenamiento de agua del suelo que van desde fuertes reducciones (por ejemplo, Podwojewski et al., 2002;Daza Torres et al., 2014;Marín et al., 2018;Patiño et al., 2021) a ningún cambio o incluso aumentos leves (p. ej., Buytaert et al., 2005;Marín et al., 2018). Estas diferencias probablemente estén relacionadas con el manejo histórico y reciente de la tierra, incluidas las actividades de quema, labranza y pisoteo, así como con la cantidad de animales que pastan las áreas de páramo (Podwojewski et al., 2002;Marín et al., 2018). ...
Páramo es un concepto complejo: un ecosistema, un bioma, un paisaje, un área geográfica, una zona de vida, un espacio de producción e inclusive un estado del clima. También es un territorio en disputa y un elemento fundamental de la cultura y la historia. Los páramos ecuatorianos han experimentado un constante cambio durante las últimas décadas. Su paisaje, su extensión, su vegetación, su fauna y su población se han visto alterados y con ellos la percepción que se tiene de los páramos.Este libro es una exploración para entender cómo y por qué el páramo ha cambiado, y cuáles son las consecuencias de este cambio. Creemos que parte de la riqueza del libro está precisamente en presentar no solo conocimientos, sino posiciones, todo lo cual enriquece las discusiones y las perspectivas.
Hydrosocial territories scholarship has contributed to advancing relational, power‐sensitive, multiscalar understandings of water and its governance. Grounded in critical water studies, political ecology, and political geography, this scholarship draws attention to how water distributions are contested between different interest groups and their respective notions of how water is and should be governed at multiple interrelated spatial and temporal scales. We provide an overview of the literature on hydrosocial territories with the objective of tracing the development and application of this framework since its introduction in the mid‐2010s. The article summarizes how hydrosocial territories research has developed conceptually, methodologically, and thematically. We find that hydrosocial territories research employs largely qualitative methodologies to study water‐related disputes surrounding a diversity of themes including hydraulic infrastructures, agricultural production and export, urbanization, river basin management, extractive industries, and conservation. We conclude with a reflection on potential ways forward for hydrosocial territories scholarship.
In response to capitalist territorial transformations, humans' predatory subjection of nature, and worldwide socio-environmental injustices, a diverse set of eco-centric, other-than-human, and indigenous worldview-inspired perspectives have emerged in water debates and practices. Rights of Nature (RoN) and Rights of Rivers (RoR) approaches are examples of this. But while these 'river ontological turns' hold exciting conceptual and political potential, they also invite critical reflection. Proponents often advance these new ontological perspectives and initiatives as being more 'real' and 'natural' than what came before. We challenge this notion by conceptualising such perspectives, similar to all ontological framings, as politically contested entrances to imagining and ordering the real. We argue that these new and alternative ontological understandings of the world-and their related initiatives-are politically produced, culturally enacted, and strategically mobilised. In effect, they contribute to the constitution (or contestation) of particular power relations. Focusing specifically on river debates, we identify and explore the following fields of contention that arise in and from alternative eco-centric and non-human ontological turns: the god-trick; naturalisation; de-centring the human; mystifying/essentialising indigeneity; and subjectification-through-recognition. By discussing these fields of contention, we call for a re-politicisation of the recent river (and other related) ontological turns, their underlying assumptions, and conceptual-political tendencies. Such critical scrutiny can contribute to enriching local/global struggles for riverine environmental justice.
